odds and ends

My usual 7:45 AM flight to San Francisco got cancelled so I have some time on my hands here at Philadelphia International and figured I should do a quick update of some sundry items:

• I went to a Sharing Ramadan event at the Foundation for Islamic Education in Villanova, PA last night to break the fast with a lot of wonderful folks of all different backgrounds and faiths. I was very struck by how diverse the local Muslim population is and how accepting they are. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, white or of color, etc. Everyone shares with everyone else and there is a genuine community. There are so many similarities with Judaism, but at the same time I don’t know that every synagogue is really that welcoming or open to people of different backgrounds. There are indeed Jews of color, but they are often marginalized or dismissed (or worse, mistaken for the “hired help.”). The other thing that delighted me was how much the Muslims I spoke with truly want dialogue and friendship with those of other faiths. We need this, and badly.
• Still working on the torture memos piece very slowly. It’s coming along, though. I am also thinking of trying to put together a piece for harpsichord as well as another piano piece. Now, all I need are the ideas.
• I was really happy to have had two radio premieres in two weeks. I guess that’s not too bad for a gynecologist.
• Speaking of gynecology, I’ll be at the next AAGL meeting in Orlando. We have three abstracts being presented there. Also not too bad for a gynecologist.
• I think Twitter is starting to replace blogging, but slowly
• Great, the flight I got booked on leaving over six hours after the flight I was supposed to take is oversold. Should I take a voucher to wait some more for a flight that gets me in to SFO six hours later than I will now? Uh, I don’t think so…

buy this album…seriously

Now on iTunes (and eMusic and Amazon). Thanks to Steve Layton, who did a phenomenal job making this all happen.

And did I mention you get over two hours of truly kickass music for $9.99? It’s a bahgain…

busy week for music

Last week was a really good week for my music. Given that I usually have to wait a long time for my music to be premiered, if at all, I was delighted that Mike Lunoe and Bill Solomon gave the first performance of bs piece (double canon for bill solomon) last Thursday (8/6) at the Hartt School of Music, essentially 11 months to the day after I started writing it in a Palo Alto hotel. Mike and Bill did an awesome job, performing with two live marimbas and four prerecorded marimbas (the piece is scored for six marimbas). It’s a bear to play, since it’s just too easy to get lost in the repetitions, plus the entire thing is 12-tone except for the last seven measures (the last chord contains all 12 tones, however). I’m still getting over the fact that no one seems to have shouted anything nasty or derogatory during the performance. Guess all the crazies were disrupting Democratic town hall meetings on health care reform instead. The performance is downloadable from the link above and has replaced my Finale-generated performance on the music page. The concert program is here.

But that’s not all…

The master composer/MIDI artist Steve Layton took it upon himself to release his excellent realization of my 80’s piano work textbook: music of solitary landscapes in hyperspace (piece for IPS) on a downloadable album via Amazon (I believe iTunes is coming soon as well). Steve broke up the 2 hour+ piece into its seven sections rather than keep it going continuously, so it’s even easier to listen to the entire thing in increments. Or just play the whole thing on an iPod /iPhone with gapless playback and experience the entire two hours in one sitting. It’s all about choice.

Finally, I locked myself in a hotel room in Palo Alto this week trying to get further into a new piece for two voices, flute, bass clarinet, violin, cello, marimba and piano I’m tentatively titling torture memos. It’s based on some improvisations I did a few months ago, mostly in May, but I’ve been really busy lately so putting it all together and scoring the music has been much slower than I would have thought. Only a little over six minutes have been dumped into Finale 2010 so far, but I’ll be back on the west coast in a little more than a week, so I hope to be more productive next time around. If anyone doesn’t mind hearing the beginning of a work in progress, click here.

So I really want to thank Mike, Bill and Steve for making last week a great week in terms of new music performance. Writing music is really really hard. Performing it with the musicianship and courage of these folks is even harder. And they make it sound easy.

brief update

Lots of good stuff going on, but I’ve been swamped so have not had time to blog.

• Next Thursday, August 6th at 7:30 PM, Bill Solomon and Mike Lunoe will be premiering my work for six marimbas titled bs piece (double canon for bill solomon) at the Berkman Recital Hall, Hartt School of Music in W. Hartford, CT. I’m listening to their latest rehearsal tape right now and it’s absolutely incredible. How they manage to play this without getting lost while syncing with a tape of the other four marimba parts and counting accurately how many times to repeat each measure (17x is not uncommon in this piece) boggles my mind. Kudos to them both for not just taking on my music but for realizing it so perfectly. The score is here. I’ll be posting a MP3 of the performance and possibly even a video once I get it from Mike and Bill.
• Just got an e-mail inviting me to be on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology, the official journal of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists. Obviously they’re extremely desperate.
• Composer/performer/MIDI artist Steve Layton is going to be releasing his realization of textbook: music of solitary landscapes in hyperspace (piece for IPS) via iTunes in the coming weeks. Steve’s realization is excellent and took him at least two weeks to accomplish. The piece is over two hours and is continuous, although it will be broken into individual sections for downloading.

two improvisations for synthesizer

• virtual music 1
• virtual music 2

As indicated, these are improvisations, not finished pieces, although I did do some tweaking of the Reason 4.0.1 files on my laptop. The set, two improvisations for synthesizer are dedicated to composer James Combs, who does a great job encouraging a bunch of us new music types to contribute improvisations/pieces for his improvfriday twitter feed at the end of every week. There are several of us who have day jobs, write music when we can because we have a strange compulsion to do so, and for the most part are autodidacts or else have very little formal training as composers. We’re the antithesis of the typical academic composer. If Reich/Young/Eastman/Monk/Palestine typify the “downtown” music scene, folks like JC Combs, Dave Seidel, Steve Layton, Paul Bailey, me and a few others represent the “outside.” Most of us are “downtown” in orientation, but unlike the “downtowners,” we don’t form our own ensembles and instead tend to write for virtual instruments since no one is exactly knocking at our doors to perform our music. So I think the term “outside” rather than “downtown” is apt. I do write music intended for “real” musicians, and will continue to do so. But the reality is that most of my works have been heard only because I can use various instrument samples and patches to simulate the real thing. And before I had software and hardware to do this, none of my music had been heard by anyone else for almost 25 years.

So I’m not going to keep writing for samplers and synthesizers to the exclusion of “analog” acoustic instruments. But these two short improvs I think stand on the own fairly well, and might form the basis of a future work for acoustic instruments (just as virtual music 1 was used to a large extent in one part of zichron)

obviously, the French have great taste in new music…

I’m getting some hits to my music page through here, and recently received a few nice e-mails from a composer involved in this site who seems to like my music. Yup, obviously deranged.

I don’t speak French, although lord knows I tried to learn it when I was at MedCases, since our sister company was in Montreal (the Montreal company survives to this day, and I still am in touch with many of the great people I knew in Canada as a result). Anyway, thanks to OS X’s translator widget, I can get a sense that it says something favorable about my music. If you speak French, feel free to translate in the comments section—undoubtedly it will be much more precise than OS X’s widget.

ECOUTEZ AUTRE CHOSE (Commentaires aux amis blogueurs)
posté le dimanche 25 janvier 2009 20:10

Petite indication aux amis bloggeurs. Je suis tombé d’abord sur un visiteur étrangé à notre plate-forme (béni soit-il par les dieux du plaisir) nommé Dionys. Cet individu commet une émission de radio fm qui diffuse des musiques inclassables va-t-on dire. C’est très riche et ça change des mièvreries qui dégueulent de nos radios fm si familières. C’est là : http://inactuelles.over-blog.com
Et puis il m’a dirigé vers un blog américain, celui d’un certain David Toub qui compose. Mais qui compose merveilleusement bien. C’est un véritable explorateur et, qui plus est, d’une infinie gentillesse. Son domaine, la musique… minimaliste. Rendez-lui visite ici: http://homepage.mac.com/dtoub/dbtmusic.html
Pour ceux qui saturent de mes compos sombres, glauques, démoniaques et j’en passe, vous allez passer de longs bons moments. Je ne parle évidement pas aux zappeurs fantômes de la plate-forme…
Tcho à tous, et si vous saignez des oreilles, z’inquiètez pas, ça cicatrise vite…

bs piece (double canon for bill solomon)

I don’t write 12-tone music anymore, and haven’t since I wrote ineffabilities over 25 years ago. Don’t get me wrong; I really like a lot of the 12-tone music I used to write, especially ineffabilities. But I moved on, and aside from some occasional 12-tone passages (generally a series of four three-note chords that get repeated a lot), all my music is written intuitively. That is, I don’t have any technique other than improvisation, nor do I care to have a ”technique.“

All that said, I did something I wouldn’t normally do: I wrote using a standard technique (canonical writing along with dodecaphony). In the process, I ended up writing a long 12-tone canon for six marimbas that is at the same time perfectly postminimalist. I have to say, though, that this was a very uncomfortable piece for me to compose, since I really don’t like being straitjacketed. I had a lot of doubts about the piece, and at first wrote it more as an academic exercise or experiment, and fully expected to ditch it and move onto something more intuitive and comfortable. But as I ruminated over this piece, it really grew on me. So I finished it, pretty rapidly actually (it helps to be holed up in a Palo Alto, CA hotel for a few days while in the Bay Area at work).

I had been asked by Bill Solomon, who participated in the premiere of objects, to write a work either for straight percussion, marimba or vibraphone. I really liked the concept, but didn’t have any ideas. Even worse, I didn’t have much time to play around and eventually manage to write something. But I was toying around with two 12-tone rows, more as an academic exercise than anything (and I could argue that for most 12-tone composers post-Schoenberg, all they did amounted to an academic exercise. But I digress). The rows had some interesting properties, in that they the even numbered notes were inversions of the odd numbered notes. So it occurred to me that the rows were themselves very basic canons. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could run with it. Not necessarily compelling, but at least interesting.

That’s when it got tricky, since nothing really was coming out of this that was that interesting to me. But I stuck with it a bit longer, since I had nothing much else to work with. First I thought about writing a really challenging piece for solo marimbist, that would have a lot of canonical writing but would be a bear to play with two hands and four mallets. So I asked Bill if marimba + prerecorded tape might be an option, and he was open to the suggestion. So I wrote the work in a matter of days. I thought of the title before even starting the work, since the concept for the piece struck me as more an academic exercise than anything else, hence the double entendre (note to self: tell the kids the title reflects Bill’s initials).

It’s a very different type of piece for me. Still, I really like it, and according to his Twitter response, so does Bill. I could only keep the strict canonical writing going for so long, and a little bit towards the end I fell into my old habits of intuitive writing (although it still uses one of the two rows). I also got a bit sarcastic at the end, with a very uncharacteristic few bars of tonality in C, but interrupted at the end by a single 12-note chord. It was a tough day, and I needed some humor.

Anyway, the MP3 is here. The long version of the score is here, and the condensed version is here. The audio file is pretty quiet, so if you don’t hear anything, feel free to turn up the volume.

Now I need to come up with a piece for saxophone quartet for Brian Kauth. I think I’ll return to intuition for that one.

Wow, it’s 1:15 AM here on the left coast (4:15 AM in Wyncote, PA time), so I’m outta here. Anyway, the piece is up on the site for anyone to download and share.

improvisational study no. 1 (1981-1982): status

It’s taken a long time, but the audio file is now done and I think I’ve found all my computer entry mistakes and Finale 2009-induced errors in the digitized score. I just want to listen to the audio file some more and take another look over the score. Everything should be up on the site pretty soon. Hey, cut me some slack: it’s 155 pages in landscape mode and 2h 4min in duration. Besides, I wrote it over 25 years ago, so what’s another few days. And it’s pretty listenable, if I do say so myself.

what I’ve been working on lately

A good friend has asked me to write a piece for a solo percussionist, probably either marimba or vibraphone. I’m definitely planning to get to this, and have started sketching out some ideas. But for quite some time, I’ve been letting an early piece of mine sit around undigitized  while I’ve worked on writing new compositions. Balancing the new with the old is tricky; like everyone else, I’d rather be writing something new. But I have a number of pieces I really like (and some I’d really rather pretend don’t exist) from the era before music notation software, and it would be great to get those into digital format and up on the music site. I did that a ways back with a 2-hour+ piece called textbook: music of descending landscapes in hyperspace (piece for IPS), and it went over pretty well.

Before writing textbook, I had written another long piece for piano called improvisational study no. 1: shingon mándaras. To this day, I still don’t know exactly how long it is, since I never played it in its entirety from start to finish. Probably somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours, but the exact duration is up for grabs. Anyway, it was my first postminimalist piece, written after another piano work, ineffabilities, which was the last 12-tone work I ever composed. IS1 is different from the music I write now, yet is also very similar. It’s in a number of movements, but works fine if everything is played without pause. I originally thought of it in two large sections: kongokai and taizokai. Kongokai, if I recall correctly, is a Buddhist term signifying the material world, while taizokai refers to the “diamond” world (it might mean something entirely different in other variants of Buddism). It’s been a long time since I studied Japanese art, which actually was the inspiration for the title. Shingon mándaras were Buddhist artworks in Japan that had these incredibly beautiful repetitive structures:

I had to take two art or music courses in college, and having no desire to take the academic music classes at the U of Chicago, opted for art instead. One class I took was in Japanese art, and it was not too great. It focused on memorizing dates of each piece of art we looked at, when all I really was interested in was appreciating the art itself. Despite the dry, academic nature of the course, the artwork blew me away, and it has stuck with me since.

Back to the music: I wrote IS1 during 1981 and 1982, and would very much like to get it notated in Finale  so that I can make a decent mp3 file from it. I’m almost there—it’s probably 80% done, but I still have work to do on it. The section I’m working on now is envisioned as including a female voice as an option, just as the first brief section of textbook can include two contrabassi. Impractical, sure, but the sonic results hopefully would be worth the effort. Here are two excerpts from the non-optimized version of the score: